There's a concept in military and emergency response called the fog of war — that moment when everything is happening at once, information is incomplete, and the people who trained for this have to decide right now, with what they have.

Cybersecurity incident response is that moment. Every time.

And the dirty secret is that most organizations don't have a plan that actually holds up when the fog rolls in. They have a playbook nobody has read and a response team about to find out whether their preparation was real or theoretical.

Today's guest has spent his career in that fog — and figuring out how to cut through it.

Patterson Cake is the Director of Incident Response at Black Hills Information Security. At Right of Boom 2026, he delivered a 3.5-hour workshop called IR Simplified — and that title alone is almost a radical act in a field with a complicated relationship with simplicity. The premise: complexity is the enemy of security, and nowhere is that more true than in a crisis.

We're going from 10,000 feet all the way down to hands-on-keyboard today — and I'd have a notepad nearby.